VILLAZAN is pleased to present “RESONANCE OF THE VOID: A Sensorial Cartography of Absence and Matter”. The exhibition is on view from May 29 to July 19, 2025, at VILLAZAN Madrid.

Can the void resonate? Can absence possess density, geometry, coordinates? 

These questions find resonance in RESONANCE OF THE VOID, the new exhibition by Carlos García, where a collection of material, contained, and deeply symbolic works unfolds a visual archaeology of what is not there. The void, far from being passive absence, becomes a field charged with tensions: trace, memory, suspended vibration.

Each piece begins from a minimal geometric structure, where the intersection of taut, precise lines of string establishes a visual coordinate that frames the invisible: a point where something once was, a symbolic axis of disappearance. On neutral surfaces (white, grey, raw canvas) matter appears as residue: an earthy accumulation, an eroded relief, a fragment of solidified time.

The tension between presence and absence is reinforced through the incorporation of minerals (coal and galena), which expand the material and symbolic language of the work. In the lighter compositions, coal appears as a fossil trace: matter that was once life, transformed by pressure and time, but also a reminder of territorial dispossession and exhaustion. Its fragility, porosity, and earthy texture evoke erosion and loss. By contrast, in darker pieces, galena introduces a radically different density: an opaque, metallic mineral, visually and symbolically heavy, with a silver, almost specular sheen, suggesting that after disappearance, not only void remains, but shadow too. While coal evokes an eroded void, galena evokes a sealed, nearly hermetic void.

These materials are not mere decorative additions but carriers of meaning: energetic residues, geological witnesses to slow, intense, irreversible processes. They signal an eroded identity, a transformed territory, an absent body. The tension between the porous and the dense articulates a dual reading of the void: as decomposition and as closure. Still, García incorporates a contemporary element, small, subtle but decisive bursts of fluorescent color that break the timelessness of the ensemble and anchor the work in the present. The fluorescent is not ornamental; it is a cut of reality in the abstraction, a luminous interference in a field of silence, an alert that reminds us this void does not belong solely to the past.

Parallel to these material pieces, the artist presents a sculpture in polished stainless steel that operates as a liminal artifact: halfway between formal object and inscription device, between material memory and specular archive. Its explicit reference to Mesopotamian tablets, specifically, the twelve tablets that preserve the Epic of Gilgamesh, introduces a symbolic archaeology of the present. Opposing the heroic narrative of the origin of civilization, this piece marks a different threshold: the moment when human language began to address, autonomously, a non-human intelligence.

Each face of the geometric solid (derived from the Geometry of Thought series) is saturated with a phrase generated by ELIZA, the artificial intelligence program created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, which simulated conversation with a Rogerian therapist. Though ELIZA did not understand the content, its conversational structure provoked genuine emotional responses in users, a phenomenon that foreshadowed many of today's tensions surrounding AI: attribution of agency, affective projection, the illusion of comprehension. By transforming those ephemeral phrases into permanent inscriptions, García turns a volatile conversation into a monument, rendering language into material, texture, and coordinate.

The choice of polished stainless steel is deliberate: its mirror-like surface reflects the viewer and inserts the self into the piece, yet mediated by a voice that does not belong to them. In that problematized reflection arises the question of subjectivity: Who is speaking? Who is listening? What is repeated when no one understands? From the perspective of conceptual art, the sculpture resonates with Jenny Holzer’s linguistic minimalism, Anish Kapoor’s specular devices, or Lawrence Weiner’s typographic inscription systems. Yet its singularity lies in transforming language into a resonant void: not total absence, but a space activated by trace, latency, and the possibility of meaning.

Both approaches, the material works and the steel sculpture, should be understood as an interconnected system, which also dialogues with Geometry of Thought. In that earlier series, García explored form as a construction of meaning through sculptures made from angular planes of polished, corten, or blackened steel; clean, forceful objects that reflected their environment, absorbed the viewer, and affirmed the presence of geometry as concrete, enclosed volume. Now, that same geometric logic shifts toward the speculative field of the eroded plane: the coordinates, the string, the axis, and the structure no longer delimit the visible, but instead suggest what is dissolving, what remains, what resists.

What in Geometry of Thought was presented as a solid body, in RESONANCE OF THE VOID becomes vibration. In both series runs a cartographic intent: through volume and through plane, meaning is pursued via form, rhythm, and tension. Yet while one constructs through solidity, the other does so through absence; while one orders and contains, the other explores erosion and latency. Together, they form an aesthetic and symbolic ecosystem, a universe built not through linearity, but through interdependence: each work occupies its place, projects its gravity, and influences the others.

This double reading is rooted in the history of contemporary art. In Arte Povera, García finds an ethical genealogy: materials that do not simulate, that do not disguise, that do not pretend to be anything else. Galena, coal, string, and dust do not function as abstract symbols, but as matter loaded with history, energy, and mineral biography. This radical trust in the power of residue connects with the povera gesture: trusting erosion as truth, the precarious as language, the elemental as a form of resistance.

At the same time, the dialogue with Abstract Expressionism does not emerge through explosive gesture, but through a field of tension: the string replaces the stroke, the matter replaces pure color, the projected shadow replaces the stain. His work holds a restrained, structural expressiveness: the body is implicated, but never the protagonist. It is a gesture that does not shout, but upholds silence.

Thus, what was once geometry is now trace; what was once reflection, now shadow; what seems silent, now vibration. The void, in all its dimensions, resonates as latent presence, fixed in the earthy accumulation, in the eroded relief, in the metallic inscription. And above all, in that flash of fluorescent color anchoring the ensemble in the present, reemerges a contemporary urgency: the void is not only past, but also alert, interruption, and a question about the future.

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